7th May 2013 Archive

Troubled mobile carrier Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) is pressing ahead with the network upgrade it hopes will rebuild its fortunes in the country, with Cisco to provide the foundation of its 4G network backbone.

Australia's communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy has failed to stretch his “red undies” over the government's budget deficit: the spectrum auction, for which the results have just been announced, yielded a little under $AU2 billion.

Fairphone, a social enterprise aiming “to bring a fair smartphone to the market – one designed and produced with minimal harm to people and planet” will next week offer pre-sales of its first handset, and if it can find 5,000 buyers the phone will become a reality.

Still deeply embarrassed that its spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), was found to have acted illegally by capturing communications from Kim Dotcom, the New Zealand government is planning on changing its laws so the Bureau can in future spy on New Zealand citizens and residents.

In a judgement peppered with criticism for the various entities clustered around the troll-machine known as Prenda Law, a US judge says the court “went to battlestations” and has passed information to various US agencies for investigation.

A major Taiwanese university has sued Apple for a second time in a year, this time for infringing one of its patents related to video compression technology in FaceTime, QuickTime and other fruity software.

Gesture control to operate next-gen home electronics is the next patent battleground - so last month we asked you lot for hand movements you'd like to see protected from the lawyers as prior art. Here are the most popular, and practical, suggestions.

Plus it keeps hiking prices - how will it hang onto these big spenders?

Comcast numbers were largely deemed good by its management team on their results call, with a few noticeable holes. Firstly, despite an increase in video revenues, Comcast in fact lost 60,000 video customers in the quarter, a number which appears to be rising. Secondly, there was a major revenue fall in NBC broadcasting.

How do you solve a problem like poor performance in distributed IT stacks? If you're application performance manager Boundary, you do it by teaching your tech to not only analyse traffic on the network layer, but also listen to app-specific alerts from typical management systems, and use this to predict where bottlenecks are going to occur.

Dish chairman Charles Ergen mighty be able to sneak through the back door into the boardroom where Sprint's special committee are meeting by attempting to snaffle over 50 per cent of the telco's shares.

Supercomputer maker Cray had been hinting that it would deliver a new cut-down version of its "Cascade" XC30 system, and the machine is being unveiled on Tuesday at the Cray User Group meeting in Napa Valley, California.

The boffins at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are known as a secretive lot; a much understated lot, in fact. Rather than cause a fuss, researchers there have quietly published a paper showing they've had a flexible quantum network – something rather a lot of people are interested in – up and running for two and a half years.

The Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA), which will allow states to levy local sales taxes on internet purchases, was passed by the US Senate on Monday night by a vote of 69 to 27, in an unusual display of bipartisan support.

Microsoft has debuted a new, native YouTube app for Windows Phone 8 with a completely redesigned interface, despite its earlier claims that Google was deliberately preventing it from delivering a first-class YouTube experience on the platform.